RESEARCH ARTICLE
Management and Comorbidities in Middle-European Patients with Rheumatoid Arthritis: A Retrospective, Cross-sectional Comparison with COMORA Data
Myroslav Levytskyi1, Sarah Maier1, Michael Schirmer1, *
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2019Volume: 13
First Page: 94
Last Page: 97
Publisher ID: TORJ-13-94
DOI: 10.2174/1874312901913010094
Article History:
Received Date: 24/09/2019Revision Received Date: 06/12/2019
Acceptance Date: 24/12/2019
Electronic publication date: 31/12/2019
Collection year: 2019
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Objective:
To assess disease-specific characteristics and comorbidities in consecutive Middle-European Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) patients, and to compare results with international data.
Methods:
Cross-sectional retrospective analysis of consecutive RA patients from a Middle-European outpatient service. Data are compared to those of the international “Co-morbidity in Rheumatoid Arthritis” (COMORA) cohort.
Results:
80 RA patients with mean disease duration of 10.6 ± 8.3 years were enrolled within 5 months. Age was 62 ± 13 years and 75% were female. The Middle-European cohort showed slightly lower disease activity than the Austrian COMORA subcohort. 88.8% of all Middle-European RA patients were in remission or had low disease activity. Despite comparable disease characteristics, the percentage of patients ever treated with biological disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs (bDMARDs) was lower in the middle-European cohort (36.3%) than in the Austrian subcohort of COMORA (59%), but similar to the international COMORA cohort (39%). More smokers were in the Austrian COMORA subcohort (48.0) than in the Middle-European (22.5%) and the COMORA cohort (13%). Hypertension (38.8%) and osteoporosis (30.0%) were the most frequent comorbidities.
Conclusion:
Comparison of RA patients from this Middle-European cohort with the Austrian COMORA subcohort showed less frequent use of bDMARDs during disease course – probably according to the local referral structure. 88.8% of the Middle-European RA-patients achieved the treat-to target-aim of remission or low disease activity.
